American Gen-Xer

@realOnlyHuman @NancyH_60 @JoeUfc76633 Indeed. And for that reason, this wife isn't my first 😉.

@AmericanGenXer @NancyH_60 @JoeUfc76633 You’re a lucky man brother. The other side is sucking the energy right out of us.

Nobody woke up today wanting to be a husband… 😂 Welcome to the married people meeting! Steve Treviño hits the nail on the head with this one. No man ever said, ‘You know what? I’m tired of making my own decisions. I want to be questioned about everything I do!’ From the parking spot drama to ‘Why did you park there?!’ — we’ve all been there. It’s not an anger problem… it’s a wife problem! Tag your husband (or that one friend who parks like a pro until she pulls up) and laugh along. Marriage is wild, y’all! Who’s relating?

@JoshuaG19367959 @abdimoalim_ I totally agree! But the comment I responded to said "every" and the pedant in me couldn't let that go.

@AmericanGenXer @abdimoalim_ The absolute might fail once someone writes code like that. However, more common is logic like: void *new_ptr = realloc(ptr, size); if (!new_ptr) { /* handle allocation failure here */ } else { ptr = new_ptr; } (I’d also check for size==0.)

Every codebase that does ptr = realloc(ptr, size) has a memory leak on allocation failure.

@ryangerritsen Wait... McDonald's in Canada served hotdogs? Or was that a special thing in those locations due to being the stadium concessionaire?

Let me take you back to 1993 in Toronto Canada. McDonald’s had 23 outlets in Skydome and guess who they employed? 1600 Teenagers aged 16 to 18 years old. These jobs were not meant to be careers, they were a way for teens to earn some money for the summer and post secondary school.

Airlines are sometimes quite deserving of the scorn they receive. This situation is not one of those cases. OP booked an itinerary to get a specific event, but with little tolerance for delays. What if there had been an hour or two of weather causing the delay, instead of the situation OP encountered? And then on top of the tight scheduling, OP booked a 1 hour and 15 minute layover at one of the country's busiest airports. I won't even mention taking dementia-suffering people to a funeral in the first place. OP's situation is unfortunate, but I'll save my outrage for situations that warrant it.

Tonight I feel like telling my @AmericanAir story, because they deserve it. My parents both have dementia, actually my Dad has Alzheimers and my Mom has dementia. When they needed to get to a funeral for a family member, it was clear someone from the family needed to chaperone them to ensure safe travel, and I was happy to do that. I booked the tickets, for the three of us, and booked wheelchair service for our American Airlines flight from Madison WI to Grand Junction CO. When looking for flights, my only goal was to find the most convenient flight for my parents - to limit the stress of flying, traveling, in unknown places. Typically, a United flight from MSN to Denver would be the path, with a quick jump to Grand Junction. For the time of our flights, that would mean a six hour layover. instead, I chose to fly MSN to DFW, with a one hour and 15 minute layover. In @MSN_Airport our wheelchairs were there, as expected, and as booked. Being slightly nervous about our shorter connection, I asked the agents to call ahead to DFW and double check if our wheelchairs would be there, I personally overhead this call and was assured they would be there. They were not. And this is where things start to fall apart, get dangerous, and then fall apart again. Our wheelchairs were not there, terminal C, we needed to get to B1. 35 minutes later, still no wheelchair - my parents (both with dementia) were allowed to get on a golf cart, to try and make the flight. I was not allowed to go with them, because I was not "disabled". This meant my parents, who have me along purely to chaperone, were seperated from me - no clue what was going on, and I had to run - physically - to try and meet them at the gate. We missed our flight, and as a result, missed our family funeral visitation - the sole purpose of the flight. A couple things make this worse: 1. Once dropped at B1, and missing our flight - we still had no wheelchairs, and the golf cart left. The flight was already gone, because we were significantly late. Abandoned is the word I'd use, because a gate agent rebooked us on a flight out of gate B28, six hours later, without bothering to care we needed a way to get there - and that walk is significant. We waited another HOUR, and got one wheelchair. Two hours later we finally had the two wheelchairs we booked. Nothing can replace what we went through, dangerous - fear and stress - and most importantly, a missed funeral. Americans response to this? First they offered a voucher for lunch. I declined. Next, I emailed this story to the CEO Robert Ison, who thought he could buy us for a $250 credit. The kicker to all this? While in the air on our first flight.....American was trying to buy our seats because they oversold it, for $450 a seat. We obviously didn't accept this, because we wanted to get to the family funeral - the whole reason for our travel! So us not taking the $450 offer per seat, meant we missed our flight, missed the funeral, experienced extreme amounts of stress - and somehow that is owrth $250 to American Airlines. I don't want a single penny from this company, I don't want flight credits - I honestly never want to fly with them again. What I do want? For others to hear this story, for them to formally apologize to my parents, and for some type of penalty to be applied to them that is significant enough they can never treat another customer like this, ever again.

OK, so she wasn't getting what she needed out of her marriage, and decided to leave. That's shitty, but the real problem is the bigger picture: our broken culture has convinced people like this that raising children is somehow "boring" or "unworthy" or "not fulfilling". She's been programmed to be miserable herself, and also to be a miserable life partner.

True! But the question then becomes how much this actually matters in real-world Mac programs. In general, object oriented features in Objective C are used for interacting with Cocoa, and therefore need to operate at human speed, where every microsecond really doesn't count that much. On the other hand, core business logic, algorithms, etc. tend to just be straight C or C++, without Objective C object oriented language features. The take away is that the dispatch overhead is paid mostly in the event-driven GUI parts of a program, where it isn't noticeable. OTOH maybe the battery in a MacBook would last 1% longer if we didn't have that dispatch overhead LOL.

@platoff True. I actually read about just how titanic of an effort Apple went through to make their message passing perform well... But no matter how you try, even if you rip your ass wide-open, you just aint beating indexing into an array lol.

You know Object-oriented programming is not even real, because people argue which vtable flavor is "real" OOP - static array-based (C++), or dynamic hash-based (Objective-C) Here are Jai bindings for C++ class, and for Objective-C runtime. This is your "OOP" under the hood.

@BitMsec @BadalK99277 MacOS is *UNIX*. Most definitely *not* Linux. (If your reply involves "Unix and Linux are the same thing", post it on r/confidentlywrong and not here.)

@BadalK99277 MacOs based on Linux man 😂 but apple hardware is crazy🔥

If Linux is so powerful… why do most developers still use macOS?

@AI_EmeraldApple > And yet, even under this new regime, it is still greenlighting more of Rings of Power despite its underperformance This is because ideology is the driving factor behind much of what Amazon does. DEI, wokism, etc. are their religion now.

There is more to the story behind the reason why the Stargate show on Amazon was cancelled. The original greenlighters at Amazon, Nick Pepper and Matt King, who liked Martin Gero's work that respected the Stargate lore, have been moved, let go, or restructured under a new Amazon MGM studio leadership. Under the new leadership with Peter Friedlander, who is an ex-Netflix head of U.S. and Canada scripted division, and Blair Fetter, a Netflix vet who ran “spectacle series”, they shifted focus towards maximum broad and global appeal for expensive worldbuilding shows. They want more shows like Stranger Things, 3 Body Problem, Ozark, etc, which were massive hits, and any new shows must have broad appeal, where they must convincingly bring in new viewers, not just satisfy existing fans. There is an age-old saying... A product made for everyone is made for no one. These execs don't understand that their success came during a time of a massive global crisis, and pretty much any decent show gets massive ratings due to the forcibly captive audience. COVID really gassed up a lot of execs into thinking they are geniuses when the reality is that these numbers were never going to be repeated again. What this will likely do is cause Amazon to burn massive amounts of funds for "modern audience-wide appeal" flops that interest no one and offend no one. And yet, even under this new regime, it is still greenlighting more of Rings of Power despite its underperformance. The chase for "inoffensive broad appeal" is going to bite them in the butt. The sad part is... a lore-accurate Stargate show was in the works, but because it didn't have enough modern audience broad appeal, they axed it under the new leadership. Joe Mallozzi, a long-time SG1 showrunner said, "It was a series that avoided the pitfalls of several modern remakes and reboots by fully embracing the core of its predecessors: action, adventure, exploration, wonder, heart, humor, and found family.” By all accounts, it sounded like it would have been a good show, but we'll never see it... not at least from the "new" Amazon.

@vivekgalatage This kind of thing is where C++ started to go off the rails.

C++ - which inspect will be called? Hint: overload resolution

Don't forget huge. And while we're at it, maybe we need extended and expanded strings; and also tiny, small, medium, compact, large, and huge models for strings. Come to think of it, maybe all those things would have been added to C++ only. This could have been a rich source for the kind of complexity the C++ committee craves.

@AmericanGenXer @ZPostFacto Far strings and Near strings

The world if Dennis Ritchie had chosen Pascal strings instead of NUL termination:

@ZPostFacto @adamnemecek1 Heh I had a flash of protobuf fever dream just now.

@adamnemecek1 @AmericanGenXer varint encoded length! I am 90% joking

@TrisH0x2A What "clever" soul decided to overcomplicate this by subtracting 1 in the first place?

Miranda IM and dozens of other open source projects had this exact bug PVS Studio found it in more than 100+ real codebases what is the output when s = "" (empty string)?

@Anc_Aesthetics @time0149 I was in big tech when this racket started up, and observed it in action first-hand over and over again. It's... far worse than anyone outside the industry imagines.

I found out an acquaintance of mine was planning to do a not insignificant layoff of American workers at his company, so I asked him why he was doing it. Asked him if he had thought about the American families he's going to devastate when he delivers the news. And all for such a small amount of money in the grand scheme of things. He looked like I hit him with a sledgehammer. Clearly had not thought about it once. The board told him there would be a significant structural contraction in the VC market and he would need to get creative on the budget side of things. The indian VC recommended he outsource to india and lay off a decent chunk of his American coder base. He would get the CEO in touch with a firm he trusts. The CEO was going to follow that suggestion. In order to understand the sheer level of cruelty of some of these CEOs you have to understand that they literally operate inside of a cult like environment. For every independent thinking Founder like Elon there is 100 NPC retards who are the worst people you will ever meet. The entire industry has been transformed into a weird third world scam culture in a lot of ways. And when you're a first time CEO and a VC makes a suggestion like that, most of these people will follow it without thinking twice. You might as well be talking to a robot. Luckily I had a good relationship with this guy and outlined the actual risk of outsourcing your team to india and he changed course. But it got me thinking why would an indian VC meddle like this, it's not really common for VCs to get involved in hiring and firing decisions for lower level employees and the amount of money saved wasn't significant enough for a VC to care. What I later found out was that there is significant overseas pressure from the indian government for these big indian names in Silicon Valley to push business away from America and into india. It's a racket. A racket designed to scam Americans out of jobs so that indian politicians can brag to their voters that they are putting indians first. If millions of American families suffer it's fine. No one has ever mentioned it from our government. Not Trump, not Biden, not Obama, not Bush. No one.

@Mr_Husky1 @Zechman741 Whether this is real or not, Clooney is a piece of shit.

"LAST NIGHT: George Clooney attacked Dolly Parton — and received a brutal “lesson” he won’t soon forget.-BN George Clooney thought he could easily score public points by attacking Dolly Parton over her views on patriotism, traditional values, and the direction of American culture. But this time, he picked the wrong opponent. Known as one of America’s most beloved entertainment icons, Dolly Parton didn’t just respond — she delivered a powerful message about freedom of thought, personal responsibility, and respect for everyday Americans. “George Clooney says I’m dividing people with my opinions,” Dolly Parton began in a calm but firm tone. “But what truly divides this country is mocking anyone who thinks differently and pretending only one side deserves to be heard.” And she didn’t stop there. “You know what’s even more dangerous?” Parton continued. “Using fame and influence to shame ordinary people simply because they refuse to follow Hollywood’s political script.” Then Dolly Parton went even further, speaking as someone who has spent decades in the entertainment industry watching public debate become increasingly toxic and hostile toward opposing viewpoints. “It’s not different opinions that weaken a nation,” Parton said. “What weakens it is fear, intolerance, and teaching people to hate one another because of politics.” At that point, this was no longer just another celebrity feud — it became a larger conversation about free speech, division, and the future of public discourse in America. Instead of backing down, Dolly Parton turned the confrontation into a broader debate about the values the country should defend. “I’m not perfect,” Parton admitted. “I’ve made mistakes. But I will always believe that a strong country is one where people can speak freely, disagree openly, and still respect each other as fellow Americans.” And then came the line that many fans said they would never forget: “America was not built on fear or hatred between citizens. It was built on courage, freedom, and the belief that people with different views could still move forward together. So ask yourselves — who is really trying to unite this country?” What began as a celebrity attack quickly turned into something much bigger: a message about unity, responsibility, and the future of America. George Clooney thought he could attack Dolly Parton… but what she said next shocked the nation. Don’t miss her jaw-dropping response—click to see history being made:

No. People aren't interchangeable. It's a fallacy to treat them like they are. THAT is what must be overcome in our teaching regime. We can herd a group of aspiring musicians into a classroom, and teach them all about music. It will never make (most of) them Beethoven. The logical mind required for true success in computer science cannot be taught -- it can merely be guided, shaped, honed. And in that sense, it really is more like a hobby, or like art, than it is like mathematics. For this reason, the best computer scientists I knew in my multi-decade career at big tech were mostly self-taught. Yeah, yeah, of course we can teach people about engineering discipline, or computer languages, or about the canonical science itself. But that's analogous to teaching a Beethoven how to read music or how to play guitar. Surface level stuff. Also, it's highly suspect to imply that writing serviceable code in a modern computer language is impossible without understanding what's going on at gigascale all the way down into and through the CPU. That shows a lack of understanding of the most basic tenets of computer science, e.g. encapsulation. Of course some knowledge and background is important, but that's very different from what this post stated about how one line of code hiding "a billion instructions" (or whatever the imprecise terminology there was intended to convey) is somehow an indictment of modern computer programming.

A Dutch computer scientist gave one lecture in 1988 arguing that programming is unlike anything humans have ever tried to do before, and the reason most software on earth is broken is that we are still teaching it as if it were a hobby. His name was Edsger Dijkstra. He won the Turing Award in 1972. He invented the shortest path algorithm that every GPS on earth still runs on. He wrote the paper that killed the goto statement in modern programming languages. He spent 50 years quietly being one of the most consequential thinkers in the entire history of computer science, and he was in a very bad mood by the time he stood up at the ACM Computer Science Conference in 1988 to deliver the lecture that almost nobody at the conference wanted to hear. The lecture was called On the Cruelty of Really Teaching Computer Science. It is now one of the most cited papers in the entire history of computing education. It was filed in his archive as EWD1036, handwritten in his careful fountain-pen calligraphy because he refused to use a typewriter and famously refused to use email for the rest of his life. The argument was simple and uncomfortable. Programming, Dijkstra said, is a radical novelty. Not a new tool. Not a new skill. Not a faster version of something humans already knew how to do. A genuinely new category of intellectual activity that has no real precedent in the entire history of the human species, and our brains have not been built to handle it. Here is what he meant by that. When a programmer writes a line of high-level code and presses run, that single line might trigger a billion operations at the level of the silicon. The ratio between the abstraction you are working in and the physical events you are actually causing is roughly one billion to one. No engineer in history before computing ever had to reason about a system spanning that kind of ratio inside their own head. A bridge builder reasons about steel beams and the physics of weight. A surgeon reasons about organs and the physics of tissue. A chemist reasons about molecules and the physics of bonds. All of them are working inside ratios of physical scale where the largest and smallest things they need to think about are within a few orders of magnitude of each other. A programmer routinely writes one line that orchestrates a billion physical events on a chip, and is expected to predict the behavior of all of them in advance. Dijkstra argued that the human brain was simply not built for this. Every intuition we have evolved over hundreds of thousands of years comes from a world of medium-sized objects behaving in continuous ways. Computing is the opposite. It is discrete, not continuous. A program that runs perfectly a billion times can crash on the billion-and-first iteration because of a single bit. A single character missing from a line of code can take down a power grid. There is no margin. There is no graceful degradation. The system either works or does not, and the only way to know is to actually run it. This was the part of the lecture where Dijkstra made everyone in the room uncomfortable. He said the way computer science was being taught in universities was a quiet disaster. Professors were teaching programming the way carpenters teach woodworking. With examples. With metaphors. With analogies to things students already understood. Files are like folders. Memory is like a desk. A function is like a recipe. Dijkstra said this was actively making it harder for students to think clearly. The whole point of a radical novelty is that there is nothing in your past experience to compare it to. The moment you start reaching for metaphors, you are smuggling in old intuitions that do not apply, and those intuitions will betray you the first time you try to reason about a system the metaphor was not built to describe. His exact line was this: the usual way in which we plan today for tomorrow is in yesterday's vocabulary. And yesterday's vocabulary, he argued, was killing the field. The reason most software is broken is downstream of this single misunderstanding. Programmers are taught to think of code as a craft. Something you get a feel for. Something you pick up through practice. Something where intuition gets sharper with experience. Dijkstra said this is exactly backwards. Programming is not a craft. It is closer to mathematics than to carpentry, and the moment you treat it as a craft, you guarantee that the software you produce will be full of the kind of bugs that craftsmanship cannot catch. The fix, in his view, was to teach programming the way mathematics is taught. You should be able to prove your program correct before you run it. You should reason about your code formally, the way a mathematician reasons about a theorem, not the way a carpenter feels their way through a joint. The students who learned this way, he said, would walk out of their classes with a kind of confidence that no amount of typing practice could produce. The lecture was published in Communications of the ACM in 1989. The field did not listen. Universities kept teaching programming the same way. Software kept getting bigger. Bugs kept compounding. By 2026, almost every piece of software on earth has known security vulnerabilities, undefined behaviors, and edge cases that nobody has ever proven safe. The doom that Dijkstra warned about in 1988 is now the default condition of the digital world we have built. The deeper lesson is the one most readers miss the first time through. Dijkstra was not just talking about software. He was making a much bigger point about how humans learn anything that is genuinely new. The instinct to translate the unfamiliar into the familiar is the most natural thing in the world. It is also the single biggest obstacle to actually understanding something that has no precedent. If you keep reaching for analogies, you will never see the new thing clearly. You will only see your old framework projected onto it. This is happening right now with AI. The same instinct that made people learn programming through metaphors of files and folders is making people understand large language models through metaphors of brains and people. Almost every framework being used to describe AI in 2026 is borrowed from a previous domain. None of them quite fit. The few people who are actually building useful intuitions about how these systems work are the ones who have done what Dijkstra recommended forty years ago. They have set down the old vocabulary. They have looked at the new thing on its own terms. They have accepted that the radical novelty is radical for a reason. You are not slow. You were taught a discipline as if it were a hobby. The cruelty is real. The fix is still available.

@Chicago1Ray They will do it anyway. The grift is so deeply baked into the system at this point that only a revolution will undo it.

(29) states will likely have their laws that allow Mail-in Ballots be counted past election day overturned by the end of this month by the Supreme Court Democrats wanna keep counting until they come up with enough votes to win That's about to end now 👍

@TrisH0x2A Someone needs to learn const correctness.

a hash map in 25 lines of C FNV-1a handles the hashing, start with a fixed value and XOR each byte multiply by a prime and repeat the interesting part is the last line instead of using hash % cap it uses hash & (cap - 1) same result when the capacity is a power of two and a bitwise AND is generally cheaper than a modulo operation another neat detail is the use of void pointers for values the hash map does not care what type you store integers strings structs anything works the caller handles the casting when storing and retrieving data